All That Twitters

It cost $44 billion for Elon Musk to buy Twitter—a transaction that he initiated, then tried to back out of, before acceding under legal pressure. It was a costly acquisition, highly leveraged. The money was cobbled together from $20 billion in Musk’s assets, $13 billion in loans from big banks (which now can’t move them off their books), $6 billion in loans to Musk himself, and more than $7 billion in commitments from investors who would be shareholders of the new private enterprise.

In a May 2022 SEC filing, Musk listed a number of his planned Twitter co-investors and their equity stakes, so we had some idea who was helping him buy the company. Other reporting—including a public show of support from Saudi Prince al-Waleed bin Talal and text messages produced for a Delaware court that revealed a $1 billion commitment from billionaire tech luminary Larry Ellison—helped fill in the picture. But once Twitter went private that October and Musk set about slashing and burning the divisions of the company that offended him, there was no definitive list of its shareholders, or the names of the trusts, funds, LLCs, and other corporate entities holding their shares.

This August, a federal judge ruled in favor of a motion filed on my behalf by Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to unseal a list of shareholders that had been filed by the company, since renamed X, under seal as part of one of the many civil lawsuits that it faces in the wake of Musk’s disastrous turn at the helm. We now have a complete list—dated April 2023—of who helped Musk acquire Twitter. I’ve argued that this list is important for a number of reasons, but here’s just one: according to the Washington Post, anyone who invested more than $250 million received special access to sensitive data about the company and its users. Who pitched in that much? Saudi Arabia, Qatar, a mysterious UAE-based venture capital firm, a lawless crypto exchange, and CIA contractor Ellison. I’m sure they’re happy with their access. What follows is a rough taxonomy of X shareholders—a half-serious attempt to categorize and account for the moneymen helping boost Musk Inc. It takes a lot of cash to prop up an oligarch, and some of it comes from unsavory sources.

Elon Musk is an alleged horse enthusiast and compulsive shitposter who was one of several executive producers on the Hollywood film Thank You for Smoking. He is also the chief technology officer and executive chairman of X and its majority owner through the Elon Musk Revocable Trust, dated July 22, 2003.

Friends of Elon

Afshar Partners, LP

Omead Afshar is a Musk loyalist and fixer. As a Tesla executive, he was investigated internally for accounting issues related to the order of “a special type of glass,” possibly for Musk’s personal use. (We’ve all done it.) He was later parachuted into a high-level position at SpaceX overseeing the Starship deep-space rocket program.

Dayton Family Enterprises, LLC and Dayton Family Investments, LLC

Sky Dayton is a tech investor and the founder of Earthlink, a formerly massive dotcom-era dial-up internet service provider that gobbled up smaller tech companies and pivoted to reselling their internet services under its own brand before being acquired by a private equity firm. My ninety-five-year-old relative still pays a monthly fee for an Earthlink email address—just the email address—that she can no longer access but can’t cancel. Congratulations to Sky Dayton.

Lawrence J. Ellison Revocable Trust

Larry Ellison is the eighty-year-old founder of Oracle. Larry Ellison started his business with help from the CIA and is the second richest person in the world after Elon Musk. Larry Ellison owns the Hawaiian island of Lanai, where he invited Musk to come cleanse himself of drugs. Larry Ellison strategized about how to overturn the 2020 election. Larry Ellison promises a world where “citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.” Larry Ellison will bury us all.

Scott Nolan

Not the Hall of Fame Phillies third baseman, Scott Nolan was an early SpaceX engineer and is now a partner at Founders Fund, Peter Thiel’s investment club for Lord of the Rings enthusiasts who are curious about technofascism.

Steve Davis

A longtime Musk loyalist and Ayn Rand-quoting yogurt-maker, Steve Davis is officially the CEO and president of The Boring Company, Musk’s vanity tunneling and earthworks company, which has completed one public project: a 1.7-mile tunnel for cars in Las Vegas. Davis was part of the brain trust assembled from Musk’s corporate fiefdom to manage his chaotic acquisition of Twitter. At the time, Davis and his wife had a newborn baby, and the three of them spent nights sleeping at the Twitter office in San Francisco—an arrangement that led to Davis and his wife being subpoenaed in at least one lawsuit by disgruntled ex-Twitter employees. The baby has not yet been called to testify.

The Pershing Square Foundation

The Pershing Square Foundation is a nonprofit entity created by Bill Ackman, a Twitter essayist and leading wife guy whose hedge fund holds a large stake in Chipotle. In its 2022 IRS filing, the foundation, which has $474 million in assets, dispensed more than two million dollars in grants for cancer research, along with $200,000 for the William A. Ackman Friends of Rowing travel fund for Harvard’s rowing team. It listed its ownership of X Holdings as worth $10 million.

Venture capitalists are winners of the passive income lottery, taking big bets with other people’s money and pocketing handsome fees while knowing that most of their investments will fail. Some of these firms, like Andreessen Horowitz (also known as a16z), could also be placed in the Gulfies category, since they receive hundreds of millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and other dictatorships to invest on their behalf in U.S. tech startups. In that way, a16z and other VCs serve as laundromats for a corrupt class of kleptocrats, princelings, and other global elites.

The VCs listed here are practically all Friends of Elon. There are few unexpected names in this category, but what stands out is how some of these firms spread out their investment among multiple funds. CNK Fund IV, L.P., for instance, is an Andreessen Horowitz crypto fund. Do the partners who supplied the capital for CNK Fund know that they’re now invested in X?

In alphabetical order: 8VC Opportunities Fund II, L.P.; Andreessen Horowitz LSV Fund III, L.P., CNK Fund IV, L.P.; Andreessen Horowitz LSV Fund III, L.P.; DFJ GROWTH IV, L.P., DFJ GROWTH IV PARALLEL FUND, LLC, DFJ GROWTH X-I, L.P.; Gigafund 0.21, LP; Manhattan Venture Partners X LLC; Mirae Asset Innovation X ONE, LLC, Mirae Asset Project X Fund I, LP; SCGE Fund, L.P., SCGGF III – U.S./India Management, L.P., SCHF (M) PV, L.P., SC US/E Expansion Fund I Management, L.P., SC US/E Expansion Fund I Management, L.P., Sequoia Capital Fund, L.P., SC CDA1 LLC.

Jack Dorsey Tr Ua 12/08/2010, Jack Dorsey Revocable Trust, Jack Dorsey Remainder LLC

Former Twitter CEO Jack Patrick Dorsey is an anarcho-capitalist RFK Jr. supporter who longs for a world run on ayahuasca, Bitcoin, and freedom. Until he achieves that dream, he must content himself with a multibillion-dollar fortune built on mass surveillance of the users of the platform he helped found, and his share of Block, a global payments company.

Olivier Janssens

A wealthy Bitcoiner, Janssens once partnered with a guy nicknamed Bitcoin Jesus to “[purchase] sovereignty from a government to create the world’s first Free Society.” Janssens’s Free Society hasn’t materialized, but he’s become a pitchman for a private jet company that takes payment in Bitcoin. His friend Bitcoin Jesus is awaiting possible extradition to the United States on criminal charges for failing to pay $48 million in taxes.

Binance Capital Management Co., Ltd

One of the more laughably corrupt companies around, Binance is also the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange by volume. Its cofounder and CEO, Changpeng Zhao, is currently finishing up a slap-on-the-wrist term in U.S. federal prison for money laundering violations. Binance paid a fine of more than $4 billion for allowing its platform to become a financial clearing house for terrorists, money launderers, sanctioned oligarchs, and other bad guys. The multibillion-dollar company has no official headquarters (before he copped a plea, Zhao was based in the United Arab Emirates). Binance Capital Management Co.—which put $500 million into Musk’s buyout—is registered in the Cayman Islands with an office address on a residential street in Malta.

Andrea Stroppa

Andrea Stroppa is an Italian cybersecurity researcher who said that he has assisted Musk’s staff in addressing child sexual exploitation on the platform. Stroppa appeared to first grab Musk’s attention in May 2022, when he professed to have specialized knowledge about Twitter’s bot problem, at the time an obsession of Musk’s. He and Musk have tweeted frequently at each other in the two years since, with Musk publicly thanking Stroppa for his work on the “important problem” of child exploitation. A recent article in La Repubblica called him “Musk’s man in Italy” and highlighted his support for right-wing Italian prime minister Georgia Meloni. It’s not clear how Stroppa came about his wealth or his stake in X. He didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Shahidi Tactic Group, LLC

John Shahidi is a Joe Rogan-esque podcaster, YouTube content guy, MMA fan, purveyor of hard seltzer and beef jerky, business partner of the Nelk Boys (if you don’t know, you’re lucky), and owner of a customized Cybertruck that Musk once called “cool.”

Karim Hakimzadeh

The recently unsealed shareholder list mentions Sequent (Schweiz) AGas Trustee of the Debala Trust, which holds someone’s X shares. Sequent is a multinational financial services firm that can act as an intermediary in order to, for instance, hide the ownership of a trust. But in a 2022 Delaware Court of Chancery filing, Elon Musk’s legal team listed Karim Hakimzadeh as the beneficiary of the Debala Trust, a Swiss trust. Hakimzadeh, who did not respond to a request for comment, appears to be a Harvard-educated, London-based investor and corporate director. He was a seed investor in Juvenescence, a human longevity biotech startup that’s received more than $200 million in funding, and he is listed as the sole officer of S Tier, a recently established video game publisher.

HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud, HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud, Kingdom Holding Company

The billionaire Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal is listed twice in the shareholders list, along with Kingdom Holding Company, the conglomerate he heads. When X was a public company, he owned thirty-five million shares, making him the social media site’s largest outside shareholder. This was the same period when one of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman’s lieutenants operated a spy ring inside of X that, dissidents contend, led to the doxing, imprisonment, torture, and death of innocent Saudis. X never accounted for its role in fostering the spy ring and still faces lawsuits tracing back to the scandal.

In 2017, during MBS’s so-called crackdown on corruption, Prince Alwaleed was imprisoned and likely tortured at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Riyadh along with a few hundred other Saudi elites. It’s reasonable to believe that the prince’s ownership interest in X is now under the control of the Saudi royal family’s most violent man-child.

Q Tetris Holding LLC

Registered to a high-rise office building in Doha that houses the Qatar Investment Authority, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, Q Tetris Holding LLC is the ownership entity for the Qatari government’s share of X. You may remember seeing Musk, standing glumly with arms crossed, attending the World Cup in Qatar in December 2022. He was joined by a bunch of Qatari notables and another expert wheedler of Gulf dictator cash: Jared Kushner.

VYC25 Limited

VYC25 is the ownership vehicle of Vy Capital, a UAE-based venture capital firm run by Alexander Tamas, a German entrepreneur who became industry-famous as an aide to Russian tech mogul, Facebook investor, and former Kremlin ally Yuri Milner. Vy is the kind of firm that’s called “secretive” because journalists don’t know much about it. To be fair, it maintains a small footprint—a discreet office in Dubai and a Los Angeles office shared with Sequoia, which also invested heavily in Musk’s Twitter purchase. According to SEC filings, Vy has more than $6 billion under management. The firm, which reportedly draws some of its backing from Chinese private equity firms, has invested billions of dollars in Musk’s startups. Its U.S. representative, John Hering, who doesn’t list his affiliation with Vy Capital on his LinkedIn or X pages, has subsequently become close to Musk. Tamas has recently talked about winding down his VC investments.

The massive financial firm gets its own category. Fidelity bought pieces of X for more than twenty different funds, an incredible show of faith in Musk’s over-leveraged buyout. It’s since marked down its X holdings more than 71 percent, reflecting the emerging belief that, with Musk’s chaotic management and his enormous debt obligations, this was one of the worst takeover deals in tech history.

These are money managers, hedgies, investment advisors, and other avatars of the uber-rich who spend a lot of time on Excel spreadsheets. There’s Sean Combs, recently indicted for racketeering and sex trafficking (and sued for numerous acts of abuse, sexual assault, and violence). A few of these names are accomplished but not-quite-famous engineers and entrepreneurs who made the kind of eight- or nine-figure fortune that allows them to quietly invest via a family office. Others are CNBC regulars—like Ross Gerber, who’s had an occasionally contentious relationship with Musk and his management. ARK Venture Private Holdings belongs to Cathie Wood, a fund manager whose evangelical faith in Tesla and wild-eyed market predictions has made her a Musk favorite. Some other big names are implicated here, including Republican megadonor Ken Griffin and Bill Clinton’s party pal Ron Burkle, whose charitable foundation is registered to the same address as an entity on the investor list. But like most in this category, they didn’t buy for their clients; they bought for themselves.

In alphabetical order: ARK Venture Private Holdings LLC; BAMCO, Inc.; Bandera Fund LLC; Baron Opportunity Fund; Baron Partners Fund; Brookfield Project X L.P.; Danilo Kawasaki; Eden Relationship Capital L.P.; Gerber Kawasaki Inc.; GFNCI LLC; IMG US, LLC; Ross Gerber; Series N Dis, a series of Atreides Special Circumstances Fund, LLC; Tresser Blvd 402 LLC; UnipolSai S.P.A.; CCM 2020 Investments LLC; Cheng and Chen Family Trust; Anthem Ventures, LLC; Go Mav, LLC; Linda Ye and Robin Ren Family Foundation; Santo Lira LLC; Sean Combs Capital, LLC.

By Elon Musk standards, the investment firms Glacier Ventures, Litani, and G64 Ventures should be small fry. Yet they bought in—that is, they were allowed to buy in on a deal that Musk told his friend Larry Ellison was so “oversubscribed” that he would have to “reduce or kick out some participants.” (Musk still asked Ellison to double his initial $1 billion offer, and Ellison quickly agreed.)

Did Musk need their money? Was he doing them each a favor? Glacier Ventures’s website says they’re still currently raising their first fund. Litani is a small Chicago-based venture capital firm with investments in food and biotech startups (its managing director didn’t respond to a request for comment). G64 Ventures is another small firm that typically makes investments for less than half a million dollars and doesn’t list X among its portfolio companies.

These are the shells, trusts, holding companies, and other obscure entities whose ultimate beneficial owners I haven’t been able to identify. X Holdings I Investment LLC could be Musk, who registered X Holdings I and X Holdings II for his Twitter purchase. As always, there’s more sleuthing to do. Do you know anything about CPAs in Milan? Then look up Luchi Fiduciaria for me!

In alphabetical order: ADREM X LLC; ADREM Y LLC; Luchi Fiduciaria SR POS. 365; T. One Holdings LLC; TM33 Partner Holdings LLC; X Holdings I Investment, LLC.

There are notable names missing from this list. Peter Thiel, Keith Rabois, and other pro-Trump members of the PayPal mafia didn’t chip in, nor did Thiel’s Founders Fund. According to some of the court-disclosed texts, former PayPal exec and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman told Musk that $2 billion was “probably doable.” Musk welcomed his contribution but—maintaining the pretense that the deal was oversubscribed—said that he would “just cut back others” to accommodate Hoffman. It appears Hoffman never invested.

Musk’s friends David Sacks, Antonio Gracias, and Jason Calacanis are absent, even though they advised Musk on the acquisition and sat in the Twitter “war room” as he shredded the company roster. In April 2022, Sacks wrote to Musk, “I’m in personally and will raise an [Special Purpose Vehicle],” rather than invest through his venture-capital firm. Musk later liked a message that Sacks wrote: “Best to be low-key during transaction.” Does one of the unidentified shell companies belong to Sacks?

Now-imprisoned fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, who at the time was the richest thirty-year-old in the world, was denied entry, despite potentially offering billions. “It took me a fair bit of time to come to terms with the fact that Elon and I actually aren’t all that much alike,” Bankman-Fried wrote to me in a September 2022 Twitter DM.

It was probably best for Musk—and everyone—that he never vibed with Bankman-Fried. But he found plenty of other partners: close friends, longtime business consiglieres, B-list internet personalities, Middle Eastern tyrants, and the venture capital firms that wash their bloody billions. It’s an eclectic group, and still incomplete until we can identify some of the players behind these semi-anonymous LLCs. But the court-disclosed list of X shareholders offered what I hoped it would: a little sunshine directed toward the shadowy technofascists and authoritarians helping to underwrite Musk’s empire.